Today’s projects include house cleaning, grocery shopping, check depositing, and attempting to create a seafood soup that Art likes. MrJames regularly makes a delicious salmon soup that both he and I love, but which Art detests. Art mentioned making the same sort of soup, only using crab instead of salmon. I’m going to give this a shot tonight, using crab and shrimp. We’ll see how it goes.
     Meanwhile, on to the news:
     Murtha Snaps The Purse Closed. — Democratic Representative John Murtha, chairman of a House subcommittee on defense spending, said he will try to block the increase of U.S. forces in Iraq and force the closing of a military prison in Guantanamo Bay by withholding funds for those operations.
     I haven’t had much to say about the new Democratic Congress as of yet. Most of what I’ve been thinking about them runs along the lines of: Please don’t fuck it up. Please don’t fuck it up. Pretty, pretty please, just don’t fuck it up, okay, guys? So far, though, I’m reasonably happy with them. I’m holding my opinion on Pelosi until I really see what she’s made of. I’m a bit less than impressed with how she handled those little elections before the Congress started, but hey, she’s new, we’ll cut her a bit of slack.
     Anyhow, Dubya wants to escalate the war with 21,500 more troops, despite the fact that every reasonable person on Earth has said that’s a bad plan and probably won’t work. Murtha, in charge of the financing, says, “Er, no. I ain’t paying for it.” I’m interested in seeing how that works out. The House and Senate are also working on drafting some resolutions that further tie up war finances, making additional funding conditional.
     On the Universal Health Care Front:

WITH his leg injured in a recent skiing accident, Arnold Schwarzenegger, California’s governor, this week announced a plan that could change the terms of America’s health-care debate. The Republican in charge of the country’s most populous state, where 6.5m people, almost one resident in five, lack medical insurance, said he wants to introduce universal health-care coverage.

His recipe is a combination of insurance-market reform, government subsidies and—most important—compulsion. “Everyone in California must have insurance,” Mr Schwarzenegger argued. “If you can’t afford it, the state will help you buy it, but you must be insured.”

     Working in the restaurant industry, I meet a lot of people with no health insurance. Big corporate restaurants just about always offer some sort of insurance, occasionally even at an affordable price, but the little family owned places often don’t offer insurance at all, or what they do offer is so crappy and/or expensive that it isn’t worth buying. Frequently, servers couldn’t buy insurance if they wanted to, since insurance is paid for out of your check, and a server’s check is usually too small to pay for insurance. At my place, a server would have to pay additional money out of their own pocket to buy the insurance, because their checks won’t cover the cost. And, our insurance blows. Seriously. It doesn’t cover foot and leg problems, which is the example I always point to. What the hell good is insurance that doesn’t cover feet and legs to a server, someone who spends four to eight hours a day ruining their feet and knees? It’s stupid.
     I’ve been a member of the uninsured since I moved out of my parents’ house when I was nineteen. My mom paid the insurance premiums for me at the job I held then, so I had some crappy insurance, but I couldn’t afford the co-pay to go to the doctor then even with insurance, so I couldn’t have gone to the doctor anyways. When I left that job a few months later, I was uninsured, and stayed that way until Art got his job at his corporate restaurant, which came with a nice insurance package. (And I still can’t go to a damn doctor, because no one takes the insurance around here. Aaargh!)
     Those of you with insurance might not have any idea how much it sucks not to have it. Last year there was a nasty bacterial infection going around the area — a really, really bad cold. Most of my staff was down with it, and I watched while they traded left-over antibiotics around to each other to get over it. Most of them couldn’t afford to go to the doctor to get proper prescriptions, and couldn’t afford those prescriptions even if they could go to the doctor. I had one staff member who was slowly working herself into a wheelchair, because she couldn’t afford the surgery to get her back fixed, and couldn’t stay covered under Medicaid because she made too much money as a server. I don’t know how often I’ve had to tell a server how to deal with a UTI (bladder infection) without going to a doctor, because they can’t afford to go. I’ve given money to my staff (not like I can afford it) to go to the local clinic, or cover the rest of their prescription, so they can get over being deathly ill.
     Do we need universal health care? Fuck yes we do. Are you people crazy? Of course we do. I mean, jebus! Cuba gets her people universal health care, and we can’t? What the hell is wrong with this picture?
     Crooks&Liars has Keith Olbermann’s newest Special Comment up for viewing. Go forth, watch, listen, and be afraid.
     You guys do realize that we’ve got a fucking nutjob in the White House, with his finger dancing over the Big Red Button, don’t you? No, really. Dubya is insane. He suffers from megalomania. Go ahead, and try to tell me he doesn’t exhibit the signs of being bug-fucking nuts. At this point, I think it would be in our best interests if the Democrats dropped everything else, and impeached the shit out of Dubya before he gets anyone else killed to serve his war-mongering fantasies.
     Here’s another good article at Crooks&Liars: Condi Gets Grilled On Escalation. — Both Democratic and Republican senators alike absolutely hammered Condoleezza Rice at today’s Armed Services Committee hearing. Senators Hagel & Feingold were especially rough and you could hear the disgust in their voices.
     I don’t often quote or read Andrew Sullivan, mostly because I can’t decide if I like him or not, but here’s a nice little bit that he found: Meanwhile, in Baghdad — If this is the case, this president is lying to us once again. It’s one lie too far. If all of this is a ruse to depose Maliki and attack Iran, the constitutional consequences of a runaway, duplicitous president are profound.
     Here’s a marvelous article by TPM’s Joshua Micah Marshall: “Practice To Deceive”. The article offers some truly excellent political analysis of the Bush government and their Iraq policies, and where those policies are leading us. It’s a long article, but more than worth the read.
     That global warming that doesn’t exist? Well, it might be causing a mass extinction. Global warming over the next half-century could put more than a million species of plants and animals on the road to extinction, according to an international study released Wednesday.
     And now for something a little lighter:

What Fantasy Archetype Are you?
The Seasoned Veteran Friend You are the Seasoned Veteran Friend! You resemble Aragorn (Lord of The Rings), Merlin (Arthurian Legend), Han Solo (Star Wars), The Marquis (Neverwhere), Sirius Black (Harry Potter) and Chase (Wizard’s First Rule). You are exceedingly loyal, tricky and hardy. You regularly pull the Unlikely Hero, Mentor and Pillar-of-Strength Love Interest out of trouble and into safety. Beware The Traitor, who will make your job intensely difficult. And don’t coddle the Unlikely Hero too much, he has to learn how to fend for himself. Anyway, everyone admires you and your resourcefulness / reliability - good going!
Take The Quiz Now!	Quizzes by myYearbook.com

     PS: Does it make me overly anal-retentive if I have to correct the spelling in on-line quizzes before I post them? Just curious.

Playing the Popularity Game:

This entry was posted on Friday, January 12th, 2007 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Medicine, Politics, Real Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.